Tenthline

It has been way too long since I’ve last written in this blog.  I’m always working hard to implement great identity and content management solutions for our clients and sometimes that cuts into the time I’ve got to write for the blog.  I’ve got a moment to breathe so I thought I’d write about something amusing from our company culture: the proliferation of Macs.

When Michael and I started at Tenthline, he quickly bought a MacBook while I had just sold my PC laptop and was doing most of my work on office workstations.  He seemed to really enjoy using his MacBook for both work and play and I started to consider it as a possible investment in the future.  Zahid already had a MacBook, though he usually booted it into Windows via Boot Camp.

I was on the fence about whether I wanted to save up for a MacBook Pro or buy one of the current MacBooks.  The MacBooks didn’t have quite the specs I was looking for but the Pros were way too expensive.  The recent introduction of the new 13-inch MacBook brought the specs much closer to the Pro: I had finally found the machine I was looking for.  I bought one right away.

…and shortly after that, Jeff bought one too.

In my humble opinion, MacBooks are a joy to do software development work on.  I made the switch and I haven’t ever looked back.  The OS is simple and intuitive to use on a day-to-day basis but under the hood is a POSIX-compliant Unix system with rock-solid stability.  For web developers, it is hands-down the best development machine.

And so, the “cult of Mac” slowly seeps into Tenthline.  Our recent hire, Faisal, will probably be feeling it soon too.  =)

I got the idea for this post when Jeff and I were reading a recent discussion on programming reddit.  In summary, the poster was asking readers to help him convince his boss not to use Adobe Dreamweaver to develop their web application.

Back in the bad old days (by which I mean the 90’s of course) HTML largely pandered to visual designers who wanted to make good on the promise that visual web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape were making.  Browsers were even competing to create their own proprietary tags to offer more whiz-bang features — I’m sure most of you remember “Best Viewed In” buttons.  But no matter how many special tags were added to HTML to influence the visual layout and rendering of the page, the fact remained that to design a website you still had to fire up your favourite text editor and write code. Read the rest of this entry »

I got back from my trip to Japan just over a week ago and I seem to have finally readjusted to sleeping in Eastern Time again.   While the long vacation was quite nice and I was incredibly excited to be in Japan for the first time in my life, I’m glad to be back to my work, crafting content and identity management solutions for our clients.

I’m still catching up on technology news; things move so quickly in this industry that a little time away can mean missing a lot.  So, I want to take a moment to introduce a new personal project of mine that I’ve just made live after months of planning and work.

I’m currently producing a podcast called The Japanese Learner.  While there are more than a few podcasts out there that offer Japanese lessons, this podcast has a different aim: the goal of this show is to be host to deep and interesting discussions on how to go about learning Japanese, including study tips and tricks, books and other materials, long-term learning strategies, and tidbits of Japanese culture to keep learners motivated.  Episodes are released every two weeks, though I’m currently trying to put everything back on schedule after being away for so long.

If you’re thinking of learning Japanese or have already taken the plunge and are learning it, I highly recommend that you listen to The Japanese Learner.  I hope that you will all enjoy listening to it as much as I’ve enjoyed producing it.

My identity management work has been keeping me on my toes but since early August, I’ve been planning a trip to Japan.  And that day is drawing closer and closer.  This Sunday, I’m flying out to Vancouver for a couple of days on business and then on September 18, I’m flying to Tokyo.  I’ll be there for about 2 1/2 weeks, flying back to Canada on October 6.

These past few days have been pretty stressful; the business trip came up all of a sudden and I had to accelerate the preparations I’d been making for my Japan trip in order to accommodate it.  It has been a bit more stressful than I’d like, but I do what I have to do.

One neat little thing that came out of all of this is my new laptop.  I now own an Asus Eee PC.  I bought it because I thought it’d be very convenient for staying in touch while traveling.  With some Skype credit, it becomes a great alternative for telephony as well!  I’ll let you all know how it goes, maybe give a bit of a mini-review, even.

Wow.  It has been a while since I’ve written here.

I’ve been busy with an identity management project which is transitioning from development to testing.  For this transition, I needed to deploy my work to a test environment which more closely matches what the client is running.  Now, this is a standard Java web application with a database repository, so one might figure that this would be a smooth transition.  It wasn’t quite that smooth.  There were quite a few things that worked on my development machine but didn’t work in the test environment, which often left me puzzled.

This is one of the things I find most frustrating about being a web and Java developer.  In both web and Java, the advertised ideal is “write once, run everywhere,” but that ultimately becomes “write once, debug everywhere.”  Having to deal with idiosyncrasies of different OS’s, different software (application servers, databases, etc.), and different network configurations is sometimes an unwelcome distraction from delivering the core functionality of the solution.

This is particularly bad for CSS and client-side Javascript.  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari are all web browsers that one must take into account when designing the look and feel of websites but they all cannot quite agree on their implementation of the CSS specification or the Document Object Model.  Sometimes I’ve even run into interoperability problems where it seems the only solution is to target particular browsers with particular code by using some very ugly hacks.  So guys, what happened to “write once, view everywhere?”  =P

But no standard is perfect and even if we could have a perfect standard, a perfect implementation of it would be even more unlikely.  So integration and interoperability problems seem to be a fact of life for software developers.  The feeling of accomplishment when everything finally works together seems to offset the frustration enough that I’m happy to keep doing this work.  I think this might be a fundamental requirement for a software developer.  =)